La La Land movie review

La La Land review – all spoilers, though there isn’t much to spoil –

I admit through two thirds of the movie I was thinking “I like it, but it’s not great.”. Then I completely bought into the ending, so now I love it. Strangely, one of my favorite movie critics, Amy Nicholson, didn’t like it at all. Rarely do I pay to see a movie in theaters more than once, and I’ve seen this one thrice so far. And I’m still humming the songs, even though I didn’t think the musical numbers were all that. So at best I’m an unreliable reviewer…

The ending, while cribbed from Umbrellas of Cherbourg and other movies (it elicited an almost audible “Turn around and look!!” from me at the end) is a happy ending – sure it’s bittersweet, but the point is not that our romantic duet is over, it’s that the world is as it should be: Mia is a famous movie actress, and Sebastian owns a bona-fide jazz club. Roll credits. The fantasy sequence at the end is a fantasy that gets us to the same place; ignore the fact that our couple is not a couple, success is the only issue, and both of them have it. Hollywood types want success, not romance. How many friends have been lost over the single-minded pursuit of a dream? … be the dream fame, sport, music, politics, money, a promotion? How many romances have been torn asunder by one or both partners subjugating romance / partnership to The Dream? Here it’s only by breaking up that they both fulfill their potential.

Also missing from discussions about this movie and the ending is that Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian is The Tramp, and so in a way Mia redeems him. He’s not down on his luck, he’s in a rut of his own making. You can say that romantically Mia helps him out of the rut, but it’s not romance that does it, it’s desire – desire not for the love of a good woman, but the desire for a dream, a dream which will not die no matter how he tamps it down, a dream which will cause him to tear everyone (including Mia) out of his life until he achieves it. It’s Mia’s pursuit of her dream which launches him on an actual plan to achieve his dream. As The Tramp, Sebastian is like the Charlie Chaplin character, hopeless; Mia sets him on his way to success (it’s his idea to break up, after Mia already broke up with him) after Fate has done it’s work with the two of them.

The movie is actually Sebastian’s – we know this as the last shot fades out on Sebastian, and his journey is longest; who would suspect the douchebag blowing his horn and road rage driving would turn out to be kind and successful, and find self knowledge and happiness? His sister (who could not be played better by the always fabulous Rosemarie DeWitt) can’t help him out of his rut, precipitated by a bad investment with a scammer. Sebastian needs saving, but the saving is ultimately by his own bootstraps, after he and Mia part ways he can dedicate himself to … himself. That’s where success begins. When Mia dumps the hamster wheel of Los Angeles auditions to write her own play, that’s when she finds her voice, and when she finds success. When Sebastian dedicates himself to playing in someone else’s band (instead of the hamster wheel of lounge lizard gigs) he finds success. The climax of the movie (Mia’s final audition scene) is the story of her grandmother who literally took a leap of faith – and the song is titled The Fools Who Dream. The myth of Hollywood, come here and live your dream.

I don’t know if the director worships the 1989 movie The Fabulous Baker Boys as much as I do, but the movie seems copied more from that movie than from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The protagonist in both is a surly white man in desperate need of getting laid who is rutted playing lounge lizard gigs while he “dusts off his dreams” of playing a pure form of jazz. By the end of the movie both have been redeemed, and have modest success as they see off their erstwhile women who are more successful than they. In Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the final scene leads us to believe she is locked in to a life of anonymity, while he has chosen success – he owns his own club, a gas station.

I haven’t encountered an interview in which the director Damien Chazelle mentions The Fabulous Baker Boys, but he must have seen it … his previous movie Whiplash was also about a jazz purist, so the theme is close to his heart (first rule of writing: Write What You Know). Also the closing credits contain Emma Stone humming the City of Stars theme, which reminded me of Michelle Pfeiffer singing My Funny Valentine over the closing credits of Fabulous Baker Boys. And in the Someone In The Crowd apartment dance the camera tracks through a walk-through bathroom with a hand fan which looks cribbed from the immortal Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me shaving brushes in Fabulous Baker Boys. If Gosling’s Sebastian is a copy of Jeff Bridges’ Jack Baker, it’s not surprising coming from a director whose last movie was about a white male living The Dream; again, write what you know. And Emma’s Stone’s portrayal of Mia is astounding, as the character is very thinly written (because of a male writer, or because the character is on the cutting room floor?), something I usually rail against, but here it doesn’t bother me for some reason. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Suzy Diamond is of course a great character, and Michelle Pfeiffer certainly made her memorable.

The best “acting” in the movie was actually the first audition scene at the beginning of the movie. Apparently it is a recreation of a bad audition experience that happened to Ryan Gosling, and they added it to the script. The Side which Mia reads is a legendary kind of audition script that looks easy when you read it, but is very difficult to perform. I’m not a casting director so I’m not an expert on acting and how good performances can be, but it seems to me Emma Stone completely nailed it. The irony, which I think was intended, is that she nailed the audition, but didn’t get a callback, apparently because the casting director wasn’t paying attention. Casting directors get an equalizer at the end when a casting director is one of the few people to attend Mia’s show, and has her come in for a primo part.

I don’t consider La La Land a musical at all; it’s a movie that happens to have a couple songs and dancing. It is without a doubt a better movie because of the climactic songs, and the dancing is a nice way of setting off the dream sequences, but the movie itself to me seems like a movie (Umbrellas of Cherbourg was a through-sung movie with recitative singing, no real songs (Watch What Happens and I Will Wait for You later became hit songs in their English translations) and no dancing). The Fabulous Baker Boys was never confused with a Musical, even though there are musical performance, much of it with singing (not much dancing, although there’s the piano scene!, and of course “he gets them in the knees every time”). I wasn’t convinced of the setpiece-ness of La La Land’s first few musical numbers (including the opening car dance), they merely serve to set up the climactic scenes (Mia’s final audition and the Epilogue dream sequence would be puzzling if you hadn’t been primed to expect singing and dancing by the earlier numbers).

Composer Justin Hurwitz captured the exuberance and spirit of Michel Legrande’s music – I, like a lot of people, have been humming the tunes since I saw it. Linus Sandgren’s Cinematography has won awards, and reviewers have talked about the candy colored sky – if you’re gonna shoot a big budget movie outdoors, then shoot at the golden and blue hour! – Duh!

In the category of How It Should Be Done, it seemed like The Fall scene (argument over dinner) was shot with two cameras, instead of the usual single camera. The scene is completely awesome, and I think it’s because it was a single take. Instead of the editor having to find matching takes, and instead of people like me being Continuity Police and looking for “the fork was up now it’s down” or “the glass was on the other side!” it was effortless and seamless, and flowed much better. There is no reason to shoot a back-and-forth with only one camera. The scene made the movie – the rest of the movie may be unrealistic, but this one scene grounds the whole thing. I wonder how many times that very argument has occurred ….

The recycled jokes about Los Angeles are of course tiresome, and I didn’t even think it was a good LA romance – for me the ultimate LA romance is 500 Days of Summer. But it’s a MOVIE – a two hour opportunity to HAVE FUN. It may be a schmaltzy shlocky spectacle, but it is a great spectacle! I think it had one curse word, no violence after the road rage in the opening, and the kisses are chaste. Our protagonists only kiss twice, in dream sequences! )There’s another kiss with new Husband in the final dream sequence.) But what matters is it’s FUN! And it has one heck of a payoff, one of the best “turn around!” moments ever!…

Nocturnal Animals movie review

Nocturnal Animals movie review

I have been remiss in movie reviews … I suppose it is a compliment to this movie that more than twelve hours after I saw it, instead of dismissing it, I am typing a review, the first review I have typed for a while – at least that’s one compliment!…

It’s no secret that the older I get, the more I detest violence in art or pop culture. I have developed a total allergy to it, no matter how artfully framed. In this case, even if I were tolerant of violence in movies, I don’t think there is reason to recommend the violence present here.

I could certainly argue that the psychic damage caused by emotional savagery is a universal human experience, but equating a wife’s betrayal to senseless rape and murder seems like a first-world problem in search of a problem. If director Tom Ford intended to satirize the fragility of rich white American males, he missed the mark, because I didn’t get that from what was on the screen. If there was satire of violence in modern American society, I didn’t get that either. I suppose I understand the presence of the violence in the story, but I don’t understand why violence occupied the majority of the too-long running time of 117 minutes – only two hours?? wow, there was a lot packed in there – hey, that could be a compliment!

Is Tom Ford auditioning for an action movie? Because the big setpiece car chase was exceedingly well done. So my first real compliment is for the car chase scene. As an isolated short, it is a fantastic accomplishment in directing. But for the entire movie, as with with the power of the swimsuit (versus full nude), the power of a horror story is THINKING what might happen, rather than being confronted with it in excruciating detail.

My next compliment is for the match cuts, even though they were stolen from, say, The Hours (2002). If you’re going with parallel story lines, the textbook says use match cuts. This is a textbook example; not innovative, but the correct tool for the correct job.

Obviously this mess would have been a complete mess without Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal – suspension of disbelief of this mess occurs only because they hang on to their characters so well, especially Jake Gyllenhaal. Not sure if I wasn’t paying attention, but I didn’t know he was such a good actor. Maybe the director got something more out of him, whatever happened here he is fabulous. And Tom Ford probably has every movie star calling him for a part in his next movie as he makes them look really pretty – even an evil character sitting on a toilet.

The MVP is without a doubt the score! The composer is Abel Korzeniowski from A Single Man, and I will need to re-watch it as thought the movie was brilliant, but I don’t remember the score; maybe the score was why I loved A Single Man so much? If so, it was a brilliant score because I didn’t notice it. Here in Nocturnal Animals the score is fantastic, but because I was not immersed by the movie I noticed the score. It is a textbook example of how to unobtrusively use music to guide the viewer and hold the viewer’s interest without giving away The Man Behind The Curtain. I can’t imagine putting up with this movie without the score. Some people seem to have the opinion of this movie “it’s so beautiful I could watch it without the sound” – not me. Not that the cinematography isn’t excellent (Seamus McGarvey, BSC and ASC), but the score provided the substance for this mess.

Sidebar: I noticed in Abel Korzeniowski’s bio that he studied under Krzystof Penderecki, one of my favorite composers. So I am no doubt predisposed to like his compositions.

SPOILER BELOW:
My favorite part of the movie was an Easter Egg – maybe it’s there, maybe I imagined it – the two women from the opening credit sequence appear outside the strip club where the evil guy is apprehended.
END SPOILER

So is there any there there? I say No! The movie is ponderous and devoid of even the tiniest crumb of humor, and devoid therefore of humanity.

The movie is a crib of Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, devoid of Almodovar’s humor (which is what makes him Almodovar!). Note that I thought The Skin I Live In was a hoot, many people thought it was morbid and macabre (which it was) but I don’t think it took itself seriously or tried to be an Important Movie (cue the pompous ass James Cameron saying: When I made Terminator I tried to make a Film and accidentally made a Movie, when I made Titanic I tried to make a Movie and accidentally made a Film) – Nocturnal Animals seems exceedingly self-important and Deep.

I take that back, there is some gallows humor that Michael Shannon plays very well. The audience I was in laughed a couple times at his delivery. So it does have more than zero laughs. Michael Shannon is playing the Michael Shannon part, at least he’s in different digs and duds (a different rendering of a Sam Elliot part).

It’s no The Skin I Live In, it’s no Hitchcock, I agree with reviewer Jason Bailey that the director may as well have skipped the A story and made a Sexploitation Revenge Fantasy like Last House on the Left out of the movie-within-a-movie B story. Then again, though I sometimes agree with reviewer Alonso Duralde, but NOT ONCE did I think Sam Peckinpah when I sat through this.

Reviewer Nigel Andrews made a brilliant point about it being the centuries-old plot (and nihilistic ending) of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (I haven’t read or seen staged, but I am familiar with the plot and controversy surrounding it), so maybe I shouldn’t trot out my “I’m worried about the modern world because this is an example of the decline of society” lecture. But Here It Comes!: because ten years ago I was weary of the gloom-and-doom of pop culture (begun with the ennui of the boom years of the 1990s decade in the US, the economic crash, terrorist attacks, invasion of Iraq, protests against wars and surveillance and failed immigration policy), and now, ten years on, the mood of the country seems trapped up to the waist in a concrete mold of gloom and doom, given another economic crash, unemployment, endless wars, surveillance, now the election of a highly divisive person as President) … it’s not that I think all pop culture or all movies should be escapist, but gosh darn it how about some laughter and sunshine somewhere??? There is the hegemeony of sadness, the aesthetic that sadness is “more serious” than happiness – I suppose in my own life I sometimes refelct unhappiness, but I’d like to think it is an occasional dip rather than permanent immobilization in cement – the country (the United States) seems stuck in unhappiness not merely up to the ankles but up to the waist. This movie is unhappy up to the neck. From an artistic standpoint, if that was what the director intended, then he succeed brilliantly. So maybe the movie is better than I give it credit for. But if this captures the zeitgeist of the times (it won Grand Jury Prize at the Venice film festival), then I’m gonna be pessimistic about the world’s prospects for the next decade.

High Line, airport

TPA > NYC High Line

I flew out on a delayed late afternoon flight, so I had plenty of time to noodle around with the camera in the terminal. That primed me for a late afternoon walk on the High Line the next day.

First the terminal in Tampa:

1 Bookin’ It in Terminal D

2 sunny TPA terminal

3 hat

4 TPA restored WPA art

Next day on the High Line:
Cellist at Chelsea Market dock:

5 Cellist, High Line

6 Cellist, Picasso-ish

7 Cello Player, High Line

My favorite:

8 Private Party, High Line

In the weeds:

9 High Line, closer to its natural state

vote on which version you like better:

10 High Line Friends green

11 High Line Friends warm

This next one has been altered – can you tell?

12 My Shadow, High Line Adjacent

Find the lava lamp:

13 Lava Lamp

14 Hudson, Ferry, Highway

15 Sunset Canyon

16 10th Av Crossover

17 End of the Line at Night

Apparently the end of the High Line that goes to the Hudson River is closed after sunset.

BvS Batman versus Superman

BvS movie review

I’m glad I saw it so I can say “I saw the worst movie ever made!”!! I realize that this movie does show some understanding of the craft and history of storytelling and movies, and I try not to belittle the hard work of people who spent more than a year of their lives on a project … but this is completely worthless as film or entertainment.

Seriously, someone explain how to take this thing seriously at all, when the big battle is King Kong!! Seriously, complete with ripping off the antenna and everything!!! I love homage to the canon as much as anyone, maybe I could have gone for the Kong rip but the monster is the EXACT orc from LOTR Return of the King, including running it’s claw through the good guy!!!! Seriously, it’s the EXACT CGI monster, only scaled-up. Did the studio save on the budget by re-using the software?

Someone explain the dream sequences, did they exist only to introduce Flash and Aquaman (and so Kevin Costner can play American Gothic Grandpa)? They added to the already horrendous running time, completely unnecessarily, and I heard at least three people in the theater say “What? What’s going on? I don’t get it!?” during the dream sequences, and even I was confused by them. Not well framed at all.

What was the cinematography? I only remember one shot, okay two, the memorable one was the last frame (before the coda), three standing over a fallen friend, taken from the graphic novels. The other shot was at the beginning, bat dagger stuck in the doorframe, should have been backlit better, I understand they were saving the Batman logo for later but if you’re gonna go there, go there.

The score is one of the worst, most bombastic scores I’ve heard. There was exactly one cue which did not make me want to hurl. Seriously, I know what Hans Zimmer sounds like, but this was bad even for him. Maybe it was his name on the credits but other composers doing the writing; I hope he got a really big check, he lost all credibility.

For a movie that is supposed to set up a franchise of at least five movies there were surprisingly few Easter Eggs, and stunningly few laughs. From reading other reviews the most common word seems to be “joyless”, and that’s exactly what sitting through this movie was for me, and the restless people around me. I wish I had seen it with a loud, snarky audience, that’s the only way it would have been fun, if the audience came up with zingers to mock the ludicrousness of it all.

I will pay someone to write a movie which is not post- September 11th terror attacks Dark and Apocalyptic. Please, for the sanity of all of us, stop with the violence, and terrorism, and faux War on Terror dialogs. Please. Superhero movies aren’t supposed to be more serious than Holocaust movies. Are you trying to take the fun out of EVERYTHING? Graphic novels can be dark, but comic book movies are supposed to be fun. Movies are supposed to be escapism, especially a movie like this one. So why is it dark and depressing and sounds like news reports on television right now? If you want to change the world with your filmmaking, how about a few non-white people in the lead roles? The Fast and the Furious movies are fun, and have non-white people in the lead roles. I didn’t see Furious 7, but I’m gonna say it’s a LOT more fun than this one.

I should say I appreciated the lines of dialogue which discussed important philosophical issues. Normally I would praise that in this kind of movie, but here there are so many that it seems like Star Trek Gibberish, a line of dialogue thrown in to explain something and never mentioned again. All the Deep Philosophical Issues are given a line, but no more than one, and not revisited. I’ve heard reviewers complain about the lack of motivation for the characters; and it’s not that there isn’t any motivation, is that there is absolutely zero character development; it’s the old bad writing of characters whose actions hit certain plot points, instead of a person’s actions driving the plot. If it’s a mindless action movie then shorten the running time by cutting out all that dialogue! Two and a half hours and I have to sit through talking, I’m not here to watch a romcom!!

From reading other reviews, I can agree “at least they got the suck out of the way so the other movies can be better” but there’s no way you can get me to watch the others unless the reviews are 100% worshipful. Seriously, I don’t know how the reviews have been as positive as I’ve seen, there is nothing in this movie that I would show to film students even as a What Not To Do lesson. It was so horrible I couldn’t even figure out if it was camera placement or editiing or shot selection / coverage that ruined the visuals (or all of the above).

Another in the “sory, I don’t get it” file: if it’s called BvS, why is that dynamic such a tiny part of the movie? It was basically one line from Alfred, and a quick setpiece fight which was shorter than the fight with a monster which I don’t think exists in any of the comics.

While I ususally quote “acting is usually the last thing to go bad in a movie” in this case it’s so bad I have to throw the actors under the bus too. Jesse Eisenberg makes a strong choice to play his character like Heath Leger played The Joker, a nice homage, but completely wrong. It’s wrong because it doesn’t work, because he outplays both superhero stars, and because it is wrong for the character. The Joker is Chaotic Evil, Lex Luthor is Lawful Evil (yes, I threw down a Dungeons and Dragons reference to explain Character. Top that.). The Joker is a cackling maniac, Lex Luthor is a cerebral planner. The point of writing different villains is there are different kinds of villains, and acting them the same way misses that point. The movie further confuses itself and the audience by littering red graffiti and scrawled text which looks like The Joker’s handwriting. Talk about missing the point and confusing characters, and confusing the audience. Heath Ledger’s performance was stunningly brilliant, leave it be.

I am sooooo tired of the Furrowed Brow School of Acting; at least in two scenes Superman died and relaxed his face. Oh wait that was a spoiler; spoiler alert: I bet you don’t dislike the movie as much as I did because at least you’ll know what to expect. It would be an interesting acting theory thesis to compare/contrast BvS and Civil War America/IronMan, whatever those two do for acting and however that movie turns out … it CAN’T be this bad can it??!!

Azalea season

Three views of aloe

Three views

Minolta Rokkor-X 35-70/3.5 35mm nex7
view On Flickr

Winter aloe

Great colors and texture on aloe this winter:

BW aloe

Minolta 24-85 at 24mm with extension tubes, f22

color aloe

Minolta 24-85 at 24mm with extension tubes, f3.5

dual aloe

Minolta 24-85 at 24mm with extension tubes, f22?

with extension tubes focus is just a few mm from the front element, still less than 1:1

 

Star Wars 2015

The 3D glasses I wore to the movie last night:

3D Glasses demonstrating polarization – with Circular Polarizer on the camera lens

I actually liked it! About as well done as it can be done with thousands (millions?) of people kibbitzing and meddling.

It’s basically the first movie, no reason to change anything. They used the cheezy wipes, the non-human characters thankfully were real objects (not computer drawings), same characters … same music – they did a good job of holding the familiar themes until later in the movie. I think they dubbed voices and sounds from the original movies, especially X-wing pilots in the dogfight sequences.

I saw the 3D version, and it was okay, but I think they front-loaded the 3D; by the third reel I didn’t notice much 3D except for a couple “in your face” effects, and those were tame. Trailers before the movie were strikingly 3D – do studios put more money into 3D production of trailers than the movies themselves? It certainly make economic sense, the big-budget movie industry is currently predicated on first weekend ticket sales, so why would a studio spend millions doing high-quality 3D for a two hour movie when two minutes is all they need?

I don’t understand the kvetching about spoilers – seriously, other than being surprised at how boilerplate the plot was, what surprised you?

And someone must have sat on the JJ Abrams guy and prevented him from using obnoxious flare in every shot (start at 2:50 if you’re skipping ahead). There was some tasteful flare, and he sneaked in a couple gratuitous flares, but was very restrained.

BEGIN POSSIBLE SPOILER
Talking after the movie someone told me what could be a brilliant scene (I don’t remember if it happened exactly like this, if it did it’s perfect): on the bridge inside the ‘modulator silo’ or whatever: the sun goes out, then Kylo Ren gives in completely to the Dark Side.
END POSSIBLE SPOILER

As far as acting – yeah, the puppets out-act the humans again. Harrison Ford acts like a grumpy old man, oh yeah, he’s not acting. I was distracted by Daisy Ridley’s physical and vocal similarity to Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman – one of those small-minded, petty things I wish I didn’t think, but that’s what I thought. I also have to ask the question of why the protagonist was a white-skinned person with a Commonwealth accent – I realize the Topic Du Jour was “black stormtrooper”, but maybe the protagonist could have been a little less white? I know you’re Supposed To cast unknowns for new characters in movies like this one, but Academy Award winning Lupita Nyong’o with her non-white skin color was hidden in motion-capture … Just asking the difficult questions in case other people are thinking the same thing but don’t want to ask.

In the credits there is the bizarre disclaimer – For purposes of copyright law in the United Kingdom, at the time of release Lucasfilm, Ltd is the owner of this film – or some such. I’m assuming the legal mumbo-jumbo is the result of the guy who made the original Stormtrooper helmets for the first movie sold some of the leftovers and Lucasfilm sued and lost because he was a UK citizen and the US-UK copyright on trinkets ran out after 15 years; I think the legal point is everything in the movie is “art” and copyright for that is ‘death of the artist + 70 years’. Or at least it was – whatever it is now. In the US. And/or UK. OR – it could be about Disney owning Lucasfilm, and for tax purposes they are shifting ownership to the US-based Lucasfilm as opposed to Disney which owns theme parks in the EU and the UK. I’ll take both.

Definitely a summer movie – all fun, leave your brain in the popcorn. Very well made. And I appreciated that the plot didn’t exactly follow the format of comic book movies (though the original movie contributed to the creation of the template).

Lawrence Kasdan is listed as a writer, Mr 1980s movie guy (trivia – he had a bit part in Into The Night – love that movie!), maybe he was the “voice of experience” they used to capture the “spirit” of the originals. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – if Conventional Wisdom is that this movie is a return to form after the three unmentionable movies, the question is where do they go from here plot-wise? For the next movie do they copy Empire Strikes Back as much as they copied the original in this movie, or do they dare to veer off the template, maybe incorporating the offshoot non-canonical stories? As the Honest Trailers Screen Junkies said, Star Trek was the director’s demo reel to make Star Wars 7, now that he actually made it, what now??

As for what I’m excited about: before this movie was a trailer for Jungle Book with Jon Favreau directing!

The Hateful Eight

 

Tag line: Quentin Tarantino’s version of the movie Woody Allen would make if Woody Allen impersonated a Quentin Tarantino movie.

 

First, as far as acting, Jennifer Jason Leigh should get a serious acting award, and a special award  for Most Indignities Suffered in Filming (1). While you may think it’s Samuel Jackson’s movie, without Jennifer Jason Leigh tightroping the line between pathos and farce the conceit wouldn’t hold together and we’d be laughing at the man behind the curtain; but she holds herself together, and in so doing carries the movie Oz-ward.

 

I saw the digital version, not the film projection which is touring some cities. I would certainly like to see the panoramic outdoor shots in full Panavision Super 70 (65mm film), but I wonder how the interior scenes would benefit from the film chain. The dynamic range of film would be great for light streaming into a dark interior, but there isn’t much of that in this movie; the scene I remember thinking would benefit from film’s dynamic range is the barn scene.

 

Which begs the question of movie versions of one-room one-act plays – why? The story/plot/subject is claustrophobia, not an especially cinematic endeavor for an ostentatious showman like Tarantino. It’s Samuel Jackson as Hercule Poirot … with splattering brains.

 

I understand the humor in Tarantino’s voiceover, but I wonder if a little more creativity would have resulted in something a little better – something akin to the voiceover in Fallen (John Goodman / Denzel Washington and that plot twist). Of course the whole point is humor and homage – apparently even by this late time in Tarantino’s career people take his movies seriously, I’m not sure why. Whether it’s blood spatter or the “bad writing” of Let’s Give This Character a Soliloquy To Explain The Point So No One Misses It, it’s supposed to be All In Good Fun. I thought the Almodovar movie The Skin I Live In was one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen; many people thought it grotesque. Which it was! But in the funny way. Tarantino does the same thing, style over substance, retro over-the-top homage. You could argue that the pop culture Zombie obsession nowadays grew from the Grindhouse-retro Pulp Fiction which the video generation saw when they were impressionable, and now splattering Zombie brains is the fashion. Tarantino still splatters Human brains – how old school!

 

If you’re going to take the splattering brains seriously, then you have to take the Message Of The Movie seriously … in which case Tarantino’s detractors will really have trouble, because The Hateful Eight would have been written before the American Presidential election sweepstakes began in earnest, and before the Murdering Mexicans / Muslims comments. In this movie we have an allegory of modern America, where a Black Northern Liberal and White Southern Conservative must save the world by putting aside their differences and teaming up to fight The Terrorists. If you’re going to take the movie seriously, then I think you have to call Quentin Tarantino a Harold Pinter-level Nobel playwright?

 

I’ve grown weary of QT’s revenge fantasies, but if you’re going to take it to heart (“Wow, this Inglorious Basterds is a serious exploration of the Holocaust … (SPLAT) … oh wait, no, splattering blood, okay, not so much….”) don’t you also have to respect the current events in which black and brown and “Muslim looking” men are subjected to things which are supposed to be in our past?

 

We can wonder if this is the end of an era for QT, his ‘eighth movie’, titled Hateful (nine characters trapped in the cabin, unless you say the nice guy doesn’t count, so maybe). 

 

As a showman QT harkens back to those good ole days fetishized by so many Westerns which influenced QT and his fans, the Wild West days of the master showmen like Wild Bill Hickok and PT Barnum, which grew from snake oil salesman and led to robber barons and yellow journalism and other great American institutions. The movie is almost three hours long! – as a showman, QT gives his audience our money’s worth. You pay the same price for an hour documentary or a three hour big budget feature, you may as well get as much as you can. It’s a fun three hours, unless you aren’t having fun, in which case I’m sure it’s interminable. So have fun!

 

For historical influence this might be a landmark movie, since as far as resurrecting film The Hateful Eight and Star Wars have allegedly made Kodak’s film division turn a substantial profit for the first time in many years. So while it isn’t original and it’s certainly not Tarantino’s best movie, it’s Tarantino. It’s okay to laugh at splattering brains, really!

 
(1) – I don’t want to call it the Tippi Hedren Award because I don’t want to imply there was actual abuse, just that Jennifer Jason Leigh had a lot of things thrown at her.

2015 Calendar

 

A calendar is a good number of pictures, so here is a selection of 12 (+ cover) from last year …

 

Here’s my cover photo (it actually is the cover of my annual calendar!)

 

 

It is rare for me to do much more than global RAW conversion, but sometimes I have ideas.

1

 

Same airshow – I don’t have many photos of moving objects, so I’m packing them in here!

2

Not a lot of PP here, but I stumbled on the mirror/diptych idea.

3

 

Same idea – I wondered what to do with this reflection, then I figured it out: flip it!

4

 

This is the look that I think I like most:

5

 

I really love this look, though I understand many people don’t.

6

 

Ditto.

7

 

Color! The more I cropped this, the more I liked it.

8

I noticed this was taken for Day Prime 45 – Valentine’s Day

 

I usually don’t name photos, but this one is A Good Day For a Mission.

9

 

The neighborhood cat visits frequently, so I have to include her!

10

 

Taken with a lens I don’t like; a lesson!

11

 

It’s been a year since I took this and I still have no idea how to process it. I’ll call it Pelly-copter if I ever finish it [LOL]

12

 

 

Happy New Year!